Welcome

The title says it all: this blog features physics videos found everywhere on the web: animations, demonstrations, lectures, documentaries.

Please go here if you want to suggest other nice physics videos, and here if I mistakingly infringed your copyrights. If you understand French, you'll find a huge selection of physics videos in French in my other blog Vidéos de Physique.

Friday, 17 May 2013

Does your toilet water drain differently than in the other hemisphere? Is it because of the Coriolis effect? Hank has some things to clarify about these questions, and more in this edition of I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Suzie Sheehy is a researcher and science communicator who specialises in particle physics and accelerator physics.
She was one of many big names who gave talks at the IOP's Physics in Perspective event at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 2013.

Instructions: Pour water into the ashtray until the water is ~1cm deep. Push three matchsticks into the slice of lemon, in the shape of a triangular pyramid, with the match heads together at the top point of the pyramid.

Place the lemon and matchsticks in the centre of the ashtray, so that they float on the water. Light the fourth match and use it to light the other three together. Invert the pint glass over the lemon and matches, letting it sit inside the ashtray or frisbee! Watch as the lemon slice magically levitates within the pint glass!

The Higgs mechanism is meant to account for the mass of everything, right? Well no, only the fundamental particles, which means that electrons derive their mass entirely from the Higgs interaction but protons and neutrons, made of quarks, do not. In fact the quark masses are so small that they only make up about 1% of the mass of the proton (and a similar fraction of the neutron). The rest of the mass comes from the energy in the gluon field. Gluons are massless, but there is so much energy in the field that by E=mc^2 there is a significant amount of mass there. This is where most of your mass comes from and the mass of virtually everything around you.